Texas Slave Narrative

Jake Desso

Infectious laughter, scaling from a chuckling giggle to an incoherent guffaw, and combined with expressive movements of hands, eyebrows, and shoulders, make the good humor of Jake Desso
contagious. His most striking characteristic is not his stooped spare body, nor his dragging feet, but his immense capacity for enjoying his own jokes and those of others. His red-rimmed eyes, despite a definite weakness, are alert and twinkling. Jake
was a slave on the Colonel Floyd
place in Duncan Woods, Orange County, but has been in Beaumont since his early boyhood.